Eight years after the first edition, I return to bring the story up to the year 2000. In 45,000 additional words I have tried to expand on the careers of those in the original edition and add something on those who should have been given greater space the first time around or whose careers blossomed in the 1990s.

All organising principles are suspect. No taxonomy without misrepresentation. Nonetheless, necessity rules and I have chosen to gather a number of writers in a chapter called ‘Beyond Broadway’. It is, heaven knows, a vague enough term, and indicates a structural change in the American theatre that goes back several decades. It is, however, probably as good as any, provided one remembers that those gathered together in this way are heterogeneous talents united by nothing, necessarily, beyond a belief that Broadway was to be neither natural home nor validating agency.

When Henry Luce declared that his was to be the ‘American Century’, he was hardly making a high-risk prophecy. Financial and military power were already accruing in the face of collapsing empires. I doubt, however, that he gave much thought to culture. That his prophecy should also have proved true, in large degree, of the novel, poetry, art, music and dance would no doubt have surprised him. That it should also have proved true of the theatre would surely have been more of a shock. After centuries of laments at the lack of native playwrights (a lament not entirely justified), America produced a series of dramatists who not only engaged with the realities, the illusions and values of their own society but proved to be powerful and defining presences on the international stage.